I think people are confused at how much money big conglomerates like VW and Toyota spend on power train development -- i.e. VW Group revenue yearly is around 250 Billion US dollars.

In the entire group power train and vehicle development is budgeted at around 120 Billion a year, so this is just over half of that budget spread out over probably 5 years. These are not SV startups, they are enormous companies by revenue and investment (which is why they have low profits and aren't sexy to invest in )

Most likely not so much. They wont invest $84B in one year but rather over the next 5 or even 10 years. VW's annual R&D budget is about $14B and considering that ICE are going EoL, this should fall right within the means of normal R&D.

I'm useless at reading these reports but I guess they have the liquidity: http://annualreport2016.volkswagenag.com/consolidated-financ...

Maybe they'll shut/slim down the combustion departments.